Corpus-driven glossaries in translator training courses

1. Introduction: Translator training: what and how

1. Terminology – Building glossaries

2. Corpus Linguistics

2. [what] Translator needs: what kind of glossary OK

3. [how] Deliberate practice

Instruction in Corpus Linguistics OK

Building a corpus OK

Extracting terms OK

Extracting patterns OK

Extracting relevant context (examples) OK

Identifying equivalents OK

Building entries

4. Results

Chemistry OK

Cooking

Fashion OK

Photography OK

5. Final remarks

Abstract. Corpus Linguistics has been shown to be a valuable resource for the extraction of candidate terms and phraseologies from specialized corpora (Bowker & Pearson, 2002). In actual fact, this is a relatively new approach as since most glossaries are usually based on previously existing similar material. Although there are many glossaries on the market, very few have been compiled to meet a translator’s’ needs, whose main task in technical translation is to produce a natural and fluent text, whether in his native language or in a foreign language. For this reason, a glossary consisting simply of a list of terms and their equivalents will not suffice. As a text producer, a translators needs to know how a word is used, i.e., the words it how it associatecombines with other words (Firth, 1957). Besides, technical language may consist of multiword terms and even longer phraseologies. The compilation of glossaries has been addressed in the Specialization in Translation Course at the University of São Paulo as a methodology to enhance students’ specialized knowledge. It has recently been found that this approach fits in with what Shreve (2006) has

called “deliberate practice” and thus contributes to the development of students’ research and translation techniques, leading to a specialized knowledge which they will be able to put to use in any area they might come to work in. This paper will describe how this has been accomplished on various occasions, giving examples from various projects to illustrate the steps followed.

Keywords: translator training, corpus linguistics, glossaries, technical translation

Introduction

This paper will concentrate on what to teach and how in a

translator training course and will describe a methodology of using Corpus

Linguistics in terminological works.

Corpus Linguistics, an empirical approach to language studies

(McEnery & Wilson, 1997), has proved to be a valuable tool for the extraction of

candidates for technical terms and phraseology from corpora (Bowker &

Pearson, 2002). This is quite an innovative methodology as many current

glossaries are based on existing ones, either editing or adding to them. In

contrast, corpus-driven terminology derives all its data from a specialized

corpus compiled for that specific purpose.

Although there are many glossaries available on the market,

few meet the needs of the technical translator, whose main task is to produce a

natural and fluent text, either in his mother tongue, or in a foreign language. For

this reason, a simple list of terms and their equivalents will not suffice. A text

producer needs to know how a word is used, that is, how it associates with

other words (Firth 1957). In addition, technical language may have multi-word

terms and even longer phraseologies which may also enjoy the status of terms

and as such should be stand-alone entries in reference works, as would be the

case of freshly ground black pepper in a glossary of culinary terms.

Corpus-driven compilation of glossaries has been the focus of

Translation courses at the University of São Paulo over the years. Students

have been required to participate in projects for the construction of specialized

corpora and the extraction of relevant terminology. In this process, students

acquire specialized knowledge, such as criteria to build a reliable corpus,

techniques to investigate a corpus using specific computer programs, criteria to

select examples to include in the entries, techniques to identify equivalent terms

and to build appropriate entries. This methodology has produced, in general,

good works, some of which have already been published. From the perspective

of translator training, this deliberate practice (Shreve, 2006), with appropriate

feedback from the teacher, has certainly contributed to the development of

research and translation techniques, leading to specialized knowledge which

students will be able to put to use in any area they might come to work in.

Corpus Linguistics and Terminology

The use of corpora in translator training courses has been a

fact for over a decade (Maia, 1997, 2000; Author, 2002), but as a methodology

for the compilation of technical glossaries it was introduced in the Specialization

Course in Translation at the University of São Paulo in 2001. During a course in

Technical Translation students were divided into thematic groups and instructed

to build an English-Portuguese comparable corpus in a specialized area, that is,

a corpus with original texts in both languages. From the corpus, they should

extract the technical terms, identify equivalents and collect examples in both

languages. Glossaries resulting from this activity were made available at the

course’s site (http://www.fflch.usp.br/citrat/citrat.htm) under “Glossários”. In

2005, a proposal was made to the students to build a bilingual glossary along

the lines of a series of technical vocabularies brought out by a local publisher.

Each group could choose one field of study, and the best works would be

submitted to the publisher for possible publication. In 2008, as part of a similar

course, it was suggested that the whole class engage in one collective project

for the construction of a Photography glossary.

The steps followed to pursue these projects and the results

obtained are described below.

What to teach: translators’ needs

Before deciding on the format of the glossaries to be produced,

it was necessary to determine the translator’s terminological needs (Fromm

xxx). When one reflects about this, what immediately comes to mind is that a

translator needs equivalents, which is true but not the whole truth. As Gomez

and Vargas (2004) have already pointed out, "terminology materials should help

the translator in making decisions that are part of his daily practice." And his

daily practice involves much more than just finding an equivalent.

What kind of glossary

Considering that translators are, above all, text producers and

that their goal in technical translation is to produce a natural text, they will, in

addition to equivalents, need examples that contextualize the term as well as

information about the textual and linguistic patterns in which it occurs, that is,

they need to know the term’s collocations and phraseologies (Fromm xxx). In

case the term does not have an equivalent in the target language, translators

will need other translation possibilities or even suggestions for adaptation. On

such occasions, cultural information may help them to choose adequate

substitutions. Let us illustrate this with an example taken from Cooking. If a

translator needs to translate 1 large onion, finely chopped into Portuguese, the

glossary should provide the information that the best translation options are "1

cebola grande, bem picada” or “1 cebola grande (bem) picadinha”, because in

Portuguese “finamente” (the cognate for finely) does not usually occur in this

context. Rather, the most common adverb is “bem” (= well), which renders “bem

picada”. Another option would be the diminutive “picadinha”, with or without the

adverb “bem”. In the case of finely grated Parmesan cheese, the glossary

should provide the information that the usual translation is simply "queijo

parmesão" (= parmesan cheese), since in Brazil this kind of cheese is

customarily finely grated, so that the texture is only specified when the cheese

should be coarsely grated, which would be “ralado grosso” in Portuguese. The

cultural problem becomes even more evident when the translator encounters

the term buttermilk. Although the Portuguese language has a corresponding

term, "leitelho", it is not used, mainly because this product does not exist in our

country. Thus, the glossary can add an explanatory note and suggest, in case

the term occurs in a recipe, "to replace it with a mixture of equal parts of milk

and plain yogurt” (Teixeira & Author, 2008).

However, much of the material available on the market does not

meet these needs and is often limited to a mere to list of monolexical terms and

their equivalents in the target language, without providing examples or other

linguistic information that can help the translator to make adequate decisions

and create a natural text (Sinclair, 1984). Thus, it was necessary to create a

model for a glossary that met the needs of the translator. In this sense, Krieger

and Finatto (2004) have suggested that "Terminology, with the help of

translators, should create new methodologies for the production of materials

that serve as a reliable source of information for these professionals."

We believe that a methodology relying on the premises of

Corpus Linguistics will provide that so much needed “reliable source of

information” for translators.

Corpus Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics is an empirical approach based on the

observation of a large number of texts. These texts, always authentic, constitute

the corpora, which can be investigated by means of specific computer programs

that produce, among other data, concordance lines (see Figure 1). Examining

these lines allows one to identify recurring patterns, terms and phraseologies.

The first example is for the Portuguese word “imagem” (= image), taken from

the Photography corpus:

1 está na posição centralizada.) É exibida uma imagem ampliada. 7Pressione o 2 Á e, em seguida, carregue em•. 1 Para ver uma imagem ampliada (zoom de 3 ando os itens de regulação Corte: Girando uma imagem ampliada Utilizando a 4 ne [ Sair] e depois pressione•. QPara ver uma imagem ampliada (zoom de 5 está na posição centralizada.) É exibida uma imagem ampliada. 7Pressione o 6 a 22 do Manual da Cyber-shot.) 1 Para ver uma imagem ampliada (zoom de 7 ne [ Sair] e depois pressione•. QPara ver uma imagem ampliada (zoom de 9 imagem vista através do visor e o tamanho da imagem captada pelas lentes 9 visualizar, editar. modificar ou imprimir uma imagem captada no modo Adobe 10 de pixels). Quando se intenciona imprimir uma imagem captada por uma 11 ls, que são poucos, não afetam a qualidade da imagem capturada. Além disso, 12 antástica, porém nada se compara a tratar uma imagem capturada com 13 sde há algum tempo trabalhamos digitalmente a imagem capturada em película 14 ls, que são poucos, não afetam a qualidade da imagem capturada. Além disso, 15 ilidade da câmera para uma nova foto porque a imagem capturada primeiro

Fig. 1: A selection of concordance lines for imagem, sorted by 1st word to the right.

The above concordance lines show the recurrence of three

collocations: “imagem ampliada”, “imagem captada” and “imagem capturada”,

which might indicate that they are term candidates. Besides, one notices that

“imagem capturada” occurs 5 times while “imagem captada”, which has the

same meaning, only occurs 3 times. This seems to indicate that the first one is

probably more common and thus a more natural choice. It is important to point

out that Corpus Linguistics looks at language as a probabilistic system, that is, it

observes which patterns have a higher probability of occurrence to the

detriment of those that just feature a grammatical possibility of occurrence.

Therefore, if a technical translator seeks to produce a natural-sounding text he

should use the terms that are more probable to occur in the specialized area he

is working in.

Recurring patterns in the English counterpart of the

Photography corpus can be seen in Figure 2 below. These concordance lines

show mainly verbal collocations such as capture an image, copy an image,

delete an image, display an image and edit an image:

1 al video monitor. When you capture an image, it automatically appears on the c2 ximum depth of field. 2. Capture an image of a plain white object, such as a3 he choices are: Off—If you capture an image using long exposure while this fea4 wn list box. continued Capturing an image 43 Saving the camera images as a 5 K] to save the image. 44 capturing an image Saving the selected camera image 6 mage to another album You can copy an image of an album to another album. 7 iginal file data is deleted. To copy an image file to the computer without overw8 age and the otherimages. Copying an image to another album You cancopyan i 9 4 Opening image as another Copying an image 115 an album of the hard file form10 red position in the album. Copying an image to another album You can copy an 11 g images Your camera cannot delete an image. • Cancel the protection (page R 12 the monitor. When you should delete an image, select IDeletel in the Edit menu 13 ct language. Accidentally deleted an image. Use the Recover function to reco 14 y mistake. • Once you have deleted an image. you cannot restore it. We recomme15 TORED AS DIGITAL DATA To display an image that is digitally stored on your c16 e is displayed Tool Bar Displays an Image Information dialog box of the imag17 st at a time. Opens and displays an image file from the hard disk or MO disk18 Open File . Opens and displays an image file from the hard diskorMO disk. 19 the Camera (page 113) You can edit an image: changing image comments, moving, 20 e image file tobe opened. 4 Edit an image/Print an image/Transfer an image t21 ed. m to 3 to (D Editing an image 113 Sorting the images 114 H 22 kyOOl SkyOO2 SkyOO3... Editing an image The images in album of the hard

Figure 2: Selection of concordance lines for image, sorted by 1st and 2nd word on the left.

Corpus Linguistics can be used in two ways to compile

glossaries: as a methodology or as an approach. In the first case, we refer to it

as corpus-based Terminology; in the second, as corpus-driven Terminology.

- Corpus-based Terminology

A terminological reference source is said to be corpus-based

when texts are mainly selected because they offer a variety of defining contexts,

which will be used to build the definitions in the entries. Besides, work is usually

based on a pre-selected list of nouns – and only more recently of verbs –

derived from an ontology, which shows the structure of the area being

addressed with all its subareas. This allows the terminologist to decide which

areas to address in the glossary to be compiled. Once the list has been

compiled, definitions and examples are extracted from the corpora. Basically,

only terms and phraseologies which contain terms will make up the entries of

such a reference work. In short, the corpus is seen as a repository of definitions

and examples (Teixeira, 2008).

- Corpus-driven Terminology

In this case, as mentioned before, Corpus Linguistics is used as

an approach, that is, all entries that will make up the glossary are extracted

directly from the corpus. Corpora are constituted of the texts most commonly

written or referred to by specialists, whether they have defining contexts or not.

A list is then extracted with all the words in the corpus and their frequencies

(Figure 3).

N Word Freq. % Texts %1 THE 13,665 7.91 10 100.002 # 13,197 7.64 10 100.003 TO 4,173 2.42 10 100.004 AND 2,705 1.57 10 100.005 IN 2,621 1.52 10 100.006 A 2,560 1.48 10 100.007 CAMERA 2,216 1.28 10 100.008 IS 2,168 1.26 10 100.009 OR 2,164 1.25 10 100.0010 OF 2,111 1.22 10 100.0011 IMAGE 1,697 0.98 10 100.0012 ON 1,643 0.95 10 100.0013 YOU 1,576 0.91 10 100.0014 WITH 1,309 0.76 10 100.0015 FOR 1,284 0.74 10 100.0016 BUTTON 1,187 0.69 10 100.0017 IMAGES 1,156 0.67 10 100.0018 MODE 1,043 0.60 10 100.0019 YOUR 973 0.56 10 100.0020 WHEN 946 0.55 10 100.00

Figure 3: WordList – 20 most frequent words in the Camera subcorpus

It is interesting to notice that most highly frequent words are

grammatical words and that the first content word – camera – only appears in

position seven, and already gives an indication of the field the corpus covers.

In order to establish which of these words are typical of the area

being addressed, this frequency list is compared to another one from a corpus

of general language, usually three to five times larger than the study corpus,

which is called “reference corpus”. This comparison yields a list of keywords

(see Figure 4), which are the words that feature an unusual frequency in

relation to the reference corpus. In other words, these lexical items are relatively

more frequent in the study corpus than in the reference corpus. For this reason,

they may constitute possible “candidate terms”.

N Key word Freq. % RC. Freq. RC. % Keyness1 CAMERA 2,216 3.71 46 9,941.702 IMAGE 1,697 2.84 220 0.01 6,623.783 BUTTON 1,187 1.98 37 5,230.304 IMAGES 1,156 1.93 49 5,009.455 MODE 1,043 1.74 11 4,759.946 SELECT 828 1.38 94 3,284.807 FLASH 703 1.18 17 3,130.428 PHOTOGRAPHS 478 0.80 29 2,968.639 OR 2,164 3.62 4,022 0.25 2,937.6810 MENU 703 1.18 61 2,874.9211 EXPOSURE 636 1.06 39 2,684.1612 BATTERY 587 0.98 12 2,629.8713 SHUTTER 554 0.93 2 2,564.5314 PRESS 835 1.40 415 0.03 2,400.9015 CARD 655 1.10 144 2,338.6116 KODAK 485 0.81 1 2,253.6317 FILM 446 0.75 433 0.03 2,201.9718 PHOTOGRAPHIC 333 0.56 2 2,196.3819 DIGITAL 508 0.85 49 2,053.5620 LIGHT 370 0.62 238 0.01 2,017.40

Figure 4: 20 first keywords in the Photography corpus

This list, entirely extracted from the corpus, will be used as the

basis to examine each word in its context in order to identify possible

collocations and phraseologies. This is done running concordance lines for the

search word, as can be seen in Figure 5 for camera:

1 built the CCD into the worlds first CCD camera. This 2 state video camera. During 1975 the CCD camera with its 3 if: • The card was formatted using a DCS camera. • The 4 computer as they are captured. Once DCS Camera Manager 5 rting the Capture KODAK PROFESSIONAL DCS Camera Manager is 6 images using the KODAK PROFESSIONAL DCS Camera Manager 7 s your “digital negative.”) Refer to DCS Camera Manager 8 Camera Manager software. If you use DCS Camera Manager’s 9 racketing was added. Even with a digital camera, bracketin10 you won’t get as wide angle on a digital camera as you 11 fe with Kodak Ni-MH rechargeable digital camera batteries.12 le); 2 Kodak Ni-MH rechargeable digital camera batteries 13 eries 600-800 Ni-MH rechargeable digital camera battery

14 only a Kodak Li-Ion rechargeable digital camera battery 15 WEP Appendix EasyShare-One zoom digital camera 16 visory Kodak EasyShare C433 zoom digital camera This 17 Kodak EasyShare C433 zoom digital camera User’s guid18 col), via USB cable model U-8, EasyShare camera dock or 19 col), via model U-8 USB cable, EasyShare camera dock, or 20 r pictures and videos. • Kodak EasyShare camera dock, Koda21 dapter included with the Kodak EasyShare camera dock or 22 hich gives a medium wide angle on a film camera acts as a 23 a digital camera as you would on a film camera using the 24 l Zoom capability. If you've used a film camera, you'll be25 ver 1500 photos -- 40 rolls -- on a film camera that cost

Figure 5: A selection of concordance lines for camera.

The above lines show various collocations and phraseologies

such as CCD camera, DCS camera, DCS Camera Manager, digital camera,

(Kodak) Ni-MH rechargeable digital camera battery, Kodak Li-Ion rechargeable

digital camera battery, (Kodak) EasyShare camera dock and film camera. In a

corpus-driven terminological reference source each one of these recurrent

combinations will be listed along with relevant examples extracted from the

concordance lines.

Translator training and “deliberate practice”

For students to acquire translation competence, their training

should aim at developing specific skills that will contribute to their optimal

learning and expert performance in a certain field. (Ericsson e Charness 1997).

This requires certain conditions to be met, among which the most mentioned

one is “subjects’ motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their

performance” (Ericsson et al. 1993: 367). According to Ericsson (1996:21), this

can be achieved by deliberate practice, that is, tasks should comply with certain

requirements, such as

a) they should be well-defined;

b) they should involve an adequate degree of difficulty;

c) there should be possibility for informative feedback;

d) there should be an opportunity for repetition and correction.

This sequence of activities was followed on various occasions

during Technical Translation courses at the University of São Paulo. The most

recent ones occurred in 2005 and 2008, as mentioned before. For the sake of

illustration, we will concentrate on the 2008 project on Photography, but will

resort to other areas when they provide better examples to illustrate the

procedures being discussed.

The Photography glossary project

The first step was to establish the subareas that would be

addressed in the project. Examining instructional material on Photography, we

determined the following six topics to be covered: history of photography1, light,

cameras, studio, storage and digital photography. The class was accordingly

divided into six groups, each of which should build a comparable bilingual

corpus in the area assigned to them. They also had to select a one-page text

from their corpus to be translated by the whole class. Each group would be

“responsible” for its text and discuss its translation with the whole class.

Besides, preliminary results for the glossary were also presented so that

procedures and doubts could be discussed. The progress of the project will be

described below.

Instruction in Corpus Linguistics

As most of the class had no previous knowledge in Corpus

Linguistics, they were introduced to its basic notions in a series of three

lectures, with special emphasis on the stages of building a specialized corpus

and using linguistic software to investigate corpora, in that case, WordSmith

Tools (Scott 2007), with its suite of tools: WordLists, Keywords and Concord.

Building a corpus

Students were required to build a bilingual comparable corpus

with approximately 100,000 words in each language according to the following

steps:

o search for texts in the internet so as to avoid having to scan them. Although most texts were indeed retrieved from the internet, some groups had to resort to written material and then scan it;

o clean the texts, eliminating figures, tables, charts, illustrations and any other non-linguistic material;

o save texts in .txt format;

1 This group was discontinued during the course.

o include a header with metatextual information such as: title of the text, place of publication, date of publication, subarea etc.

This is the final composition of the various subcorpora:

Subcorpus Number of words

Camera 72,665

Digital photography 72,864

Light 36,668

Storage 59,803

Studio 72,716

Total 314,716

Figure 6: Final composition of the Photography corpus

Extracting terms (Wordlist and Keywords)

Once the corpora were built, students generated WordLists for

each of their corpora and then compared these lists with similar lists for general

language corpora. This comparison yielded words that occurred at a statistically

significant higher frequency in the study corpus (see Figure 4 above).

These words were considered term candidates as they are

peculiar to the study corpus. In order to confirm whether they were actually

terms or not, students ran concordance lines for each of the words to examine

their context of occurrence (see Figure 5 above).

Extracting patterns

Concordance lines show the search word with its surrounding

co-text, and allows investigators to identify recurrent patterns, which may also

turn out to be terms in their own right. Let us take a look at some concordance

lines for photographs (Figure 7)

1 ned, current research at RIT on albumen photographs indicates that at high relat2 as iron salts and acids. Unlike albumen photographs, platinum prints will benefi3 objectionable fading in tinted albumen photographs. The finely divided collodio4 losures are not recommended for albumen photographs. The gelatin paper print has5 hinging adhesive for unmounted albumen photographs. The hinging process for AYA6 photographs or negatives: Do not clean photographs with erasers. Brush soiled p7 ward the edges. Do not attempt to clean photographs with water- or solvent-based8 ast but not least, your freshly-cleaned photographs deserve new storage sleeves 9 a certain "learning curve" to cleaning photographs. The first step is to thorou10 quality copies of all important color photographs. Also copy some color media 11 more permanent storage. Special color photographs are also often copied to bla12 f accuracy for optimum results. Color photographs are closer to human vision 13 between 25% and 30%. Except for colour photographs and film, a stable temperatu

14 t dyes and pigments are found in colour photographs and in digital prints. Phot 15 rect sunlight—results in fading (colour photographs are more sensitive than blac16 tic photo albums can permanently damage photographs after only a few years. Dama17 ergency Instructions for Water Damaged Photographs In case of flood or other wa18 n safely cleaning and restoring damaged photographs. Not all conservators offer 19 e neglected or even some badly-damaged photographs, remember it is almost never20 ergency Instructions For Water-Damaged Photographs." This concludes the section21 pi. Most professionals produce digital photographs designed to fill a specific 22 150 Years or Longer" and "Could Digital Photographs Last For a Thousand Years?" 23 two ways in which people obtain digital photographs - using a digital camera to 24 r supplies locally to store and display photographs can be difficult. Most commo25 in a good framing store. Do not display photographs in direct sunlight or under 26 ile photographs. * Keep and display photographs in good quality storage and 27 some are safe, some are not. 4. Display photographs in the lowest light level pr28 How fortunate are those who have family photographs. For historic value or for s29 pet to sabotage a collection of family photographs! Frequently a photograph wil30 otypes, albumen and salt prints. Family photographs have unknown or undertermine

Figure 7: Selection of oncordance lines for photographs sorted by 1st word to the left.

WordSmith Tools allows concordance lines to be sorted

alphabetically in relation to the search word either to the right or to the left of it,

so that similar patterns are grouped together making their recurrence quite

evident. Thus, one can identify nominal collocations such as albumen

photographs, colo[u]r photographs, digital photographs and family photographs,

as well as verbal collocations like clean photographs, display photographs and

even longer phraseologies like water-damaged photographs.

Extracting relevant context (examples)

Once all relevant terms and phraseologies had been identified,

examples were retrieved from the concordance lines to be inserted in the

entries. If the concordance line did not show the full context, a double click on it

led to the full source text. Part of it is shown below for concordance line 25 in

Figure 7:

Important photographs should be matted to museum standards, using archival matting and backboard. Check with a professional in a good framing store.

Do not display photographs in direct sunlight or under bright lights, and keep them away from heat vents and damp locations.

Store prints in a cool and dry spot; basements, attics, and garages are not suitable locations for storage because their temperature and humidity levels vary too much.

Identifying equivalents

One way to identify possible equivalents is to compare the list

of keywords in both languages. Figure 8 illustrates this procedure for a Cooking

glossary (Teixeira & Author 2008).

Figure 8: Matching candidate terms in bilingual keyword lists

Once a pair is identified, concordance lines should be

generated to verify that both terms occur in similar contexts. When there is no

such prima facie (literal) equivalent, search can be pursued by the word’s

collocates or context (Author 2007). For example, if we wish to find the

equivalent for finely – the most frequent adverb in a Cooking corpus – we will

realize that it is not “finamente”, the Portuguese cognate for finely, because this

adverb has very a low frequency in the Portuguese Cooking corpus. So, we

can look at the collocates of finely and see with which words they occur in the

target language corpus. One of these collocates is chopped, “picado” in

Portuguese. The concordance lines will show that “picado” co-occurs with

“bem”, yielding the collocation “bem picado”, but they also show a typical

Portuguese term “picadinho”, which may also occur with “bem”: “bem picadinho”

(Fig. 9):

2 cebolas médias bem picadas½ dente de alho bem picadojunte os tomates pelados bem picados.Calabresa picadinha100 g de bacon picadinho2 dentes de alho picadinhosPolvilhar salsa bem picadinha

1 MINUTES 2 TBSP 3 ADD 4 MINS 5 OIL 6 UNTIL 7 CHOPPED 8 PAN 9 OZ 10 BUTTER 11 INGREDIENTS 12 HEAT 13 SALT 14 SUGAR 15 PEPPER 16 COOKING 17 COOK 18 TSP 19 AND 20 METHO D

1 SOPA 2 SAL 3 CHÁ 4 COLHERES 5 XÍCARA 6 MINUTOS 7 PREPARO 8 COLHER 9 INGREDIENTES 10 COLOQUE 11 FOGO 12 MANTEIGA 13 LEITE 14 DEIXE 15 ÁGUA 16 DE 17 FARINHA 18 LEVE 19 AÇÚCAR 20 MOLH O

Figure 9: Selection of some concordance lines for picad*, sorted by 1st Word to the left.

If even this procedure does not reveal an equivalent, maybe

because there is no equivalent in the target language, it would be possible to

suggest an adaptation or insert an explanatory note. Because we are dealing

with a comparable corpus, with original texts in both languages, this kind of

information may be retrieved from the corpus itself.

Building entries

To meet translators’ needs, as discussed above, entries

portrayed the following information:

head word (part-of-speech) Example in English

equivalent, example in Portuguese

Comments (if necessary)

Here are a few sample entries from the Photography glossary:

acid-free (adj.)

For added protection, acid-free envelopes and boxes are availabe from conservation suppliers.

de pH neutron

Só são aceitáveis para embalagens de arquivo de fotografias papéis de pH neutro ou próximo de neutro, isentos de lignina e sem corantes.

Termo usado quando u produto contém nível de pH acima de 7.0. Indica que em sua composição não foi utilizado nenhum componente com reação ácida ou que, com o passar do tempo se decomponha produzindo resíduos ácidos que causam sérios danos às fotografias.

adapter card (n.)

The adapter card may have multiple ports.

cartão adaptador

Conecte a extremidade de 6 pinos do cabo em qualquer porta disponível ao cartão adaptador IEEE 1394 do computador.

additional development (n.)

development, additional

At the end of this process, students had built their bilingual

glossaries, which were examined by the instructor and returned with comments

and suggestions. This way, students had the opportunity to revise their work

and make any necessary changes, adjustments or additions. Only the final

version was evaluated.

Results

As said above, this procedure was carried out on two

occasions, 2005 and 2008. From the glossaries produced by the 2005 class,

one on Chemistry has already been published (Perrotti-Garcia & Rebechi 2007)

another one, on fashion, is due to come out in 2010.

A Cooking glossary built along the same lines was produced by

a former translation student and co-authored by Author (Teixeira & Author

2008). Although not part of either the 2005 or the 2008 project, it is an offspring

of one of the 2001 glossaries, namely the glossary on Cooking spices and

condiments. After finishing the Translation course, Teixeira pursued her

master’s degree with a thesis on the translation of cooking recipes (Teixeira

2004) and her PhD with a dissertation on a proposal for a Cooking dictionary

aimed at a translator’s textual production (Teixeira 2008)2.

The results of the Photography project, unsurprisingly, were a

bit uneven. One group excelled and one presented very poor material. The work

of the other groups was good but needed some improvement. As the aim was

to submit high quality material to the publisher and only one glossary met this

requirement, after grades had been assigned, the instructor called a meeting of

those who would be interested in pursuing the project on their own time and

making all necessary adjustments for the work to be suitable for submission to

the publisher. A group of six students decided to embrace the project and the

final material was submitted to the publisher in early 2009. It is now being

examined by a professional photographer and expected to still be published in

2010.

Final remarks

This article was intended to demonstrate how a corpus-driven

methodology can produce glossaries that meet the translator’s needs and how

this practice can enhance students’ translation competence.

2 Both works were done under the supervision of Author.

Although the methodology described did not follow – at least

consciously – any learning theory, it proved to meet the conditions for

“deliberate practice” (Shreve 2006), as shown above and in previous work by

Alves & Author (in print). First of all, the task was highly motivating because,

quality permitting, the final outcome would be submitted to a publisher which

brings out a collection of technical glossaries. Besides,

a) the task was well-defined: students knew what was expected of them and they were instructed in the stages to be followed to complete the project;

b) it involved an adequate degree of difficulty as most of the class had no previous training in Corpus Linguistics;

c) students received informative feedback by means of comments and suggestions provided by the instructor, both throughout the course and on the pre-final glossary;

d) students had the chance to repeat any of the stages, if needed, and make necessary corrections and only then turn in their final version.

Further evidence was obtained in a questionnaire aimed at

checking whether the above conditions had actually been met and which was

answered by both authors of the Chemistry glossary (Perrotti-Garcia & Rebechi

2007) independently – two years later. They remarked that a) they learned a lot

in their work with corpora; b) they realized that, in retrospective, they could have

produced a more complete glossary, which attests to the fact that they had

incorporated the methodology into their professional practice; c) the feedback

they received from the technical reviser (as part of the publisher’s preparation of

the final version of the material for publication) helped them to improve the

glossary. One of the authors underscored that “the methodology really worked

and that the use of a corpus can help overcome difficulties which are inherent to

working in an area in which one is not an expert” (Alves and Author in print). It

must be remembered that they were both students and not experts in

Chemistry, although one of them had studied a bit of Biochemistry as part of her

training as a dentist. They also mentioned that the reviser, a translator and

chemical engineer, commented that she “ would never have been able to collect

the terms as [the authors] did”.

All this comes to show that building corpus-driven glossaries

proved to be an adequate practice to enhance students’ performance towards

achieving translation competence, both because Corpus Linguistics has shown

to be an effective approach to build technical glossaries that meet the

translator’s needs and because the methodology was considered an adequate

practice in helping students achieve specialized knowledge and master

translation techniques which they will be able to put to use in any technical area

they may come to work in. (Alves & Author in print).

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